He was braced for annoyance that he had not discussed it with her, resentment that Barclay had been working when she wasn’t, or, perhaps most justifiably, a demand to know what he was playing at, given the state of the agency’s finances, but she simply said, with more amusement than rancor:
“You know you didn’t tell me. Why did you keep him there?”
“Because I’ve got a gut feeling there’s a lot more to the Knight brothers than meets the eye.”
“You always tell me to mistrust gut feelings.”
“Never claimed not to be a hypocrite, though. And brace yourself,” Strike added, as they got up from the table, “Raphael’s not happy with you.”
“Why not?”
“Izzy says he fell for you. Quite upset you turned out to be an undercover detective.”
“Oh,” said Robin. A faint pink blush spread over her face. “Well, I’m sure he’ll bounce back fast enough. He’s that type.”
41
Henrik Ibsen,
Strike had spent many hours of his life trying to guess what he had done to cause the sullen silence of a woman in his vicinity. The best that could be said for the prolonged sulk in which Lorelei spent most of Friday evening was that he knew exactly how he had offended her, and was even prepared to concede that her displeasure was, to some extent, justified.
Within five minutes of his arrival at her flat in Camden, Izzy had called his mobile, partly to tell him about a letter that she had received from Geraint Winn, but mainly, he knew, to talk. She was not the first of his clients to assume that they had purchased, along with detective services, a mixture of father-confessor and therapist. Izzy gave every sign that she was settling in to spend her entire Friday evening talking to Strike, and the flirtatiousness that had been apparent in the knee touching of their last encounter was even more pronounced by phone.
A tendency to size Strike up as a potential lover was not uncommon in the sometimes fragile and lonely women he dealt with in his professional life. He had never slept with a client, in spite of occasional temptation. The agency meant too much to him, but even had Izzy held attraction for him, he would have been careful to keep his manner on the antiseptic side of professional, because she would be forever tainted in his mind by association with Charlotte.
In spite of his genuine desire to cut the call short—Lorelei had cooked, and was looking particularly lovely in a silky sapphire blue dress that resembled nightwear—Izzy had displayed the persistent adhesiveness of a teasel. It took Strike nearly three-quarters of an hour to disentangle himself from his client, who laughed long and loudly at even his mildest jokes, so that Lorelei could hardly fail to know that it was a woman who was at the end of the line. Hardly had he got rid of Izzy and begun to explain to Lorelei that she was a grief-stricken client, than Barclay had called with an update on Jimmy Knight. The mere fact that he had taken the second call, considerably briefer though it was, had, in Lorelei’s eyes, compounded his original offense.
This was the first time he and Lorelei had met since she had retracted her declaration of love. Her wounded and affronted demeanor over dinner confirmed him in the unwilling belief that, far from wanting their no-strings arrangement to continue, she had clung to the hope that if she stopped pressuring him, he would be free to reach the realization that he was, in fact, deeply in love with her. Talking on the phone for the best part of an hour, while dinner slowly shriveled in the oven, had dashed her hopes of a perfect evening, and the reset of their relationship.
Had Lorelei only accepted his sincere apology, he might have felt like sex. However, by half-past two in the morning, at which time she finally burst into tears of mingled self-recrimination and self-justification, he was too tired and bad-tempered to accept physical overtures which would, he feared, assume an importance in her mind that he did not want to give them.
“Weren’t you even going to say goodbye?”
“You looked very peaceful. I’ve got to go, Robin’s picking me up at—”
“Ah,” said Lorelei. “No, you wouldn’t want to keep Robin hanging around.”
“I’ll call you,” said Strike.
